In Syria‘s war-ravaged northwest, an elderly woman and four of her children fell victim to shelling by the Syrian army, according to reports from both rescue teams and a monitoring organisation on Thursday.
The house in Kfar Nuran, near the front line within the western Aleppo province’s final rebel-held enclave, was subjected to an overnight bombardment.
‘An elderly woman and four of her children were killed in shelling by regime forces on the outskirts of Kfar Nuran,’ said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.
The White Helmets rescue group also said a house was hit, killing ‘five civilians from the same family, including three women’, and injuring another woman.
The faction, conducting operations in Syria’s rebel-held territories, disclosed that the affected individuals were a family that had been uprooted by fighting in different areas of the country.
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Covered in white burial shrouds, the corpses of the woman and her adult children, which included two daughters and two sons, were conveyed to a location near Atareb, as recounted by an AFP correspondent.
Rebel-held regions in northern and northwestern Syria are inhabited by a populace exceeding four million.
The region that came under fire is close to the demarcation between government forces and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist organization formerly linked to the Syrian arm of Al-Qaeda.
HTS is the dominant force in the last enclave of armed opposition in northeastern Syria, governing a substantial portion of Idlib province and territories adjacent to Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia provinces.
Idlib saw the declaration of a ceasefire in the wake of a government offensive in March 2020, facilitated by Russia and Turkey, though it has suffered from recurrent violations.
The Observatory, a group based in Britain with a network of sources in Syria, reported that on Wednesday, government shelling in the eastern region of Idlib province claimed the life of a girl and left seven civilians wounded in Sarmin.
The outbreak of the Syrian civil war can be traced back to 2011 when President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces crushed peaceful protests.
With the assistance of Iran and Russia, the Assad regime has successfully recaptured a substantial portion of the territory it had ceded at the beginning of the conflict.
Over 500,000 lives have been lost, and millions have been displaced from their homes due to the war’s devastating impact.